Traditional methods for disseminating guidance include books, videos, and other media created by experts. The impersonal nature and lack of emphasis on motivation and accountability often cause these traditional methods to fail. This is particularly true for expert advice on personal behavioral modifications, such as weight loss. Generally, Internet-based expert services merely place these traditional methods on a digital framework. For the example of weight loss, websites such as eDiets.com and WeightWatchers.com provide tips and articles, written by experts, pertaining to the subject of weight loss and fitness. These Internet services suffer from the same weaknesses as the traditional methods. In particular, online articles and tips written by experts are typically viewed once by a user, discarded, and quickly forgotten. Furthermore, a viewer of the expert advice lacks accurate information on how well the viewer has followed the advice, thereby the efficacy of the expert advice is unknown to the viewer.
Social networks, such as Facebook.com and MySpace.com, provide online communities for members to create and maintain friendships. Typically, a member selects other members to be friends based on pre-existing relationships or user profiles of other members. A member is able to communicate and share online features with the friends. In existing social networks, potential friends sharing a particular interest and/or goal can be difficult to find and require extensive searches.
Traineo.com, DailyStrength.com, and SparkPeople.com are examples of health support websites that attempt to build communities and social networks for health improvement. These health support websites suffer from the same friend-finding difficulties as social networking websites. In addition, health support websites are similar to more traditional methods of advice dissemination in that they provide their users with only limited interaction capabilities with expert advice provided by the website.
Social bookmarking websites, such as Digg.com, provide tools for communities to form based on online material, such as a news story or a blog post. Social bookmarking allows users to tag or label some online content and communicate with other users who have tagged or labeled the same content. The communications are typically limited to comments written on an online bulletin board and no further interaction with the online content is provided.
The present invention addresses at least the difficult problems of personal behavioral modification and social networking.